


Rain

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F, Rainmaker AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 07:47:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2261634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a little AU tale extremely loosely based on the play/movie The Rainmaker. All I’ve taken from that is that there’s a rainmaker and a spinster... all the rest is my own invention.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rain

The dirt is dry. It crumbles beneath Myka Bering’s feet when she goes into her family’s fields… though why she goes to the fields, she doesn’t know, because the dirt won’t be any less chalky on any day, any hour, that she goes. There’s nothing for her to do out there in the rows of wilt, for not even weeds are growing anymore. Every green thing sags and falls through every scorching day, then it breathes a little in the night, gathers itself… but the nights are too heavy for anything to breathe much. Thick nights. Felling days. The crops don’t stand a chance.

Weeks they suffer. Weeks they wait.

“Can’t control the weather,” Myka’s father tells his spinster daughter. But they and Myka’s still-young sister go to church each Sunday and pray. Everyone knows they’re praying for rain, though no one says it aloud, not even the preacher, but if he is not praying as hard as all the rest of them are, it must be because he knows his eternal reward is coming soon… no one will live in this town much longer without rain.

****

Myka is out front of the house when she hears something. At first it’s just a little tickle of a noise she can’t name, something nudging at her ears; it eventually resolves into the dust-clop of hooves, the creak of a decrepit wagon.

She looks into the sun, watches the wagon approach, driven by someone with no hat, long hair, dark clothes… and it’s a woman, Myka sees as she nears. A woman, alone, driving a wagon, a long coat draped across the seat beside her.

The wagon stops a few feet from Myka.

Eyes dark like water at night regard her. A sinuous voice, one that should almost be hiding under a cool rock during the blaze of day, says, “I heard you needed rain.”

****

Her name is Helena Wells. “Helena Wells,” she says, “rainmaker.”

Myka’s father scoffs, tells her that no one needs a cadger in a drought. They need real rain, not mysterious promises.

“My promise is not at all mysterious,” Helena tells him. “My promise is rain. If the people of this town pay me, I will bring rain. Very soon, rain will fall upon you.”

Myka and Tracy stand to the side as Helena says these words. “No one can do that,” Myka whispers to Tracy, and she is reassuring herself as much as she is telling her sister. “Weather is science, not any kind of magic.”

“This is why nobody wants to marry you,” Tracy whispers back. “Stop talking about science.”

Helena turns her head slowly to look at Myka. “Talk about science as you will,” she says.

“Science doesn’t matter to you?” Myka challenges.

“Science matters a great deal to me,” Helena says. “But it is not all that is in the world.”

Myka tries to salt her voice with scorn as she says, “So you’re just going to… make rain? Out of what, our hard-earned money?”

“Money is far harder to earn, is it not, when there is no rain?”

Myka doesn’t have an answer for that. She sees her father balancing the real possibility of ridicule from his fellow townspeople, particularly his fellows on the town council, against the minuscule chance of success. He is also balancing his ledger, thinking of the money they don’t have now, what they won’t have, months from now, if there are no crops to sell.

A man who prays in church already believes in something. He might believe in magic, too.

Myka’s father says, “We’ll go into town.”

****

Myka’s father talks to the mayor, and they gather as many people as they can find, all in the schoolhouse. Nothing to do in the fields, no way to comfort the livestock—these things mean that they find a lot of people. Almost as many as go to church.

Helena speaks to them. Softly at first, then louder, then softer again, recalling for them their lives before the drought, when the world was green. _Drought_ becomes an evil word, in her mouth, a word to be feared, to be confronted, and finally to be vanquished, by the sweet purity of _rain_. She will do it, she tells them. She is the only one who knows how to bring the forces to bear, to call what must be called, and she will do it, but she must live too, and no one can live, not in these times, without money. Money and rain.

And Helena gets her money.

Myka watches the people she thought she knew edge up to Helena, watches her take their money with a nod that speaks of absolute certainty. No one who hands her a bill seems sure of what to do; they don’t speak to her as if she were a person. They are hushed, reverent, for she could be royalty, she could be the devil, but they don’t care, because they need to believe that someone can do something.

Every now and then, Helena looks sidelong at Myka, who cannot tell if that look means she is Helena’s cross to bear or her co-conspirator in a plot she has yet to reveal.

****

Helena sleeps in the Berings’ barn that night. In the morning, Myka takes a plate of hard biscuits out to her. She has put a small dab of their remaining honey on the plate, just as a little something to soften the biscuit’s dryness.

“No rain yet,” Myka says as she hands the plate to a slightly unkempt Helena.

Helena looks down at the food. She looks up at Myka and smiles. Then she dips her head to the plate and licks the honey from it.

****

Two days pass, and on the morning of the third day, the mayor rides by. He, too, as Myka does every morning and evening, remarks on the lack of rain. He says that he and the town council would like to speak to both Myka’s father and Helena—but Myka’s father says Helena is busy. She goes to the fields, he says, and she calls for the rain.

Myka hears him and he barely sounds like her father at all. He has become a believer: he thinks that Helena is actually _doing_ something, when anyone with eyes can see that she is just _looking_.

The mayor says that he and the rest of the council would like to see him in the afternoon anyway. They have questions. The mayor generally gets what he asks for, so Myka’s father says he will go.

“I need you to go with him,” Myka tells her sister.

“I see how you look at her. And how she looks at you,” Tracy counters.

“Keep him in town for the evening,” Myka begs Tracy. “Talk the mayor into inviting you to dinner. Or someone else on the council, I don’t care. Please.”

Tracy says, “They think they’re getting rain. What do you think you’re getting?”

Myka says, “Something I want. Just once.”

And Tracy nods.

****

Helena is standing in the beet field in the early evening when Myka walks up behind her. “I hear you,” Helena says.

“You could hardly help it,” Myka says. “Nothing’s moving. Too hot even for the bugs.”

“Not for much longer.”

“If you say so,” Myka says.

“I do.” She clears her throat. “You should believe in me.”

“I’ll wait for proof.”

“What will that be, exactly?”

“Rain,” Myka says.

“We’ll see,” Helena says. “Why did you come out here?”

“Time for dinner.”

“Is your father back?” Helena is still facing away, so Myka can’t see her face as she asks.

“No. He’ll be in town for a while yet.”

“And your sister went with him.”

“She did,” Myka says.

“Just us, then.”

“Just us.”

“Give me a minute,” Helena says.

“Ten minutes,” Myka tells her. “Don’t be late.”

****

Helena isn’t late. She isn’t late, and it isn’t dinner, either: she appears at the door, and Myka doesn’t even bother pretending. She is hungry, and Helena is there, and she is oh so willing, and she moves oh so quickly to meet Myka’s lips, her arms, her body. They have no time, and there will never be any rain, and Myka thinks she might as well have something, some taste of what she wants before everything dies.

They move together with heat, with all the weight of this neverending wave, and Myka would sweat but it is too hot even for that. She cries out when Helena kisses and bites and takes her as high as a person can go, and she wishes she knew Helena, really knew her, knew her days and nights and how she might smile so easily and sweetly when she is not hot with desire, but Helena has been hot with desire ever since she rode up to Myka that first day, and Myka has been hot too. Now, afterward, is the first time Myka feels like they can be themselves, holding each other quietly and not urgently, calm, sighing, almost as if they could be this way for more than the little time, the so little time, they are likely to have.

Tell me where you came from, Myka wants to say, tell me where you are going, tell me where you will be, every day beyond this one, but instead she says, “I want you again.”

And Helena’s hands know her better than anyone ever has, her mouth is more intimate than any friend; she might one day answer all of Myka’s questions, but it wouldn’t make any difference. “I want you too,” Helena says. “Since that first moment, you, you with your suspicion, your science, but now? So much more. So much more.”

Her words make Myka greedy, even as the shadows extend. Helena starts to say words of warning, and Myka knows it’s because she’s done this before, taken something that was given, something that should never have been given or taken. Those others probably heeded her, but Myka doesn’t want to be like the others, so she keeps her hold on Helena, doesn’t let her escape, keeps their bodies locked together until they both fall asleep.

****

Myka knows that Tracy tried. She can hear Tracy’s voice, louder than normal, all the way outdoors; she is saying, “No, Dad, why don’t _you_ take care of the horse tonight?”

As Helena wakes, she holds Myka closer, kisses her one last time. And that is their undoing; her father finds them. They are dressed by then, but no one could doubt what they have done.

“My daughter,” he says at Helena. He seems dazed.

“She didn’t,” Myka says. “She didn’t. I did. I did this.” She did it _because of_ Helena, because of the heat of her gaze across an already sunburned field, because of the play of her words against Myka, because of everything, even her posture, the square of her shoulders as she faces the horizon.  But she, Myka, she did this.

“Stop talking,” her father says. “You have to keep living in this house.”

Myka looks at Helena, thinks for a wild moment _no, no, I don’t_ —but Helena is bowing her head, taking the blow. “He’s right, Myka,” she says.

“Give back the money,” he coughs. “You give back the money. You can’t give anything back to my daughter, but you can give back the money.”

Helena reaches in her trouser pocket and pulls out the bills. She offers them to him, but he shakes his head. “Put it on the table. I won’t take it from your hand.”

Myka reaches to her, takes the money. She brushes her fingers against Helena’s palm. Helena’s fingers move as if to close around Myka’s… but she stops. She drops her hand.

“You’re no rainmaker,” Myka’s father says.

From Helena, only silence. Myka wants to tell her to talk her way out of it. She is no rainmaker, but she is a magician, and Myka wants her to practice that magic, to speak that rise and fall again, that fall and rise, and remind him, remind him and Myka, of why they believed in her.

Instead, after one darting, guilty look at Myka, she leaves.

****

The rain comes in the deepest, darkest part of the night. At first, Myka, unsleeping, feels as if Helena has slipped back into her bed, crept in to whisper the word “rainmaker” into her ear.

But the sound grows and grows, and rain is roaring down, but within it, somehow, Myka hears something, a combination of sounds she knows, and she throws her clothes on to go out front, to see, because she knows what she hopes will be true, but it won’t be, it won’t be.

But in the dark there is a wagon, driven by a woman, alone. She is wearing a long coat.

“Did you come back for your money?” Myka tries to ask, but she wonders if Helena can hear her words, there is so much water, all over her mouth, her face, all over everything she thought she would never be able to say.

“Of course I want my money,” Helena says, and Myka believes her. Of course she wants her money.

But then Helena slides down from her wagon. She splashes through the deepening pools that separate the two of them. Strides strongly, with the water rising at every step, every placement of a boot a splash, until she is face-to-face with Myka, face-to-face, soaked to the skin, soaked to the soul. “But I want you more,” Helena shouts into the sodden air. “I didn’t have to come back,” and it is Helena’s voice, not the rain, that is drenching Myka now. “I can get money anywhere.”

Even in the summer heat, the bucketing wetness is chilling, and Myka tries to tell herself that that’s why she moves closer to Helena. That’s why she doesn’t heed anything she knows about deception and perfection and it doesn’t matter at all, none of it, because she is pulling Helena to her, their mouths are together, again, as before, and all of Helena’s words have come true, and the rain is keeping promises everywhere. “Will you take me with you this time?” Myka asks.

“I will take you everywhere,” Helena says. She moves Myka’s hair from one side of her neck to the other, kisses the skin she exposes. “You will be my demon, the muse without whom I cannot call the rain.”

“You can’t call the rain at all,” Myka says, but she is ecstatic, she is rapturous, and it is even better than when Helena first came here, with her swindling words…

“Does it matter?” Helena asks.

She is trickery itself. She is a striped-snake lie, a sweet-talking temptation, sugar with a delicious mouth.

Without her, rain would have fallen tonight. But not _this_ rain, not this getaway rain.

To Helena, Myka says, “We’ll see. We'll see, rainmaker.”

END

**Author's Note:**

> original tumblr tags: no disrespect to la Hepburn, but that movie with her and Burt Lancaster is really not that great, except for the scene in the barn, but I didn't want to replicate that, because I wanted Myka to have more agency, I genuinely don't know where this thing came from, other than a desire to write a Helena who is persuasive in a slightly different way


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